Anvil vs traditional tools: Faster, Better, Cheaper

Executive Summary

We find that developing a real, commercial app in Anvil is 7 times faster than using traditional web development tools. Over the whole development cycle, this adds up to an 80% saving in time and resources.

Anvil represents an opportunity to move faster, iterate quickly, and lower costs for delivering business critical infrastructure.

The Brief: Efficient Distribution of Updates and SDKs

An IP licensing company was experiencing rapid growth, bringing on a large number of integration partners. Each partner’s onboarding process required a range of deliverables. The company would distribute background information as the relationship began, then development kits as they integrated the company’s technology, and marketing materials to support the final product release.

Initially, these materials were distributed by email, but that rapidly proved unscalable. Off-the-shelf tools such as Dropbox were better, but the overhead of updating so many shared folders was impeding the company’s ability to grow.

The company needed a custom solution: A self-service “partner portal” through which these materials could be downloaded by authorised users. New uploads and permissions should be managed by the sales team, without engineering involvement.

The Alternatives: Anvil vs Traditional Web Tools

This challenge allowed us to compare Anvil against traditional tools for developing web applications. After the specification was developed, the system was built twice: once with Anvil and once with traditional web tools (HTML/Javascript/CSS/server/database). Each version was built by a different developer, skilled with the respective tool-set.

The Result: An 80% Cost Saving

The traditional web application was completed in a week of development time (35.5 hours). The same application was completed using Anvil in 5.25 hours - seven times faster.

Including the time taken for specification and evaluation (1 hour each), the total development cycle was 7.25 hours with Anvil, compared with 37.5 hours using traditional techniques. This adds up to an 80% saving in time and resources for this project.

The Opportunity: Lower Costs and Greater Agility

Businesses need to respond quickly and efficiently to their IT demands. Anvil makes web application development more efficient. Faster turnaround means more agility, higher quality and lower costs.